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Aerobic debromination of BDE-209 by Rhodococcus sp. coupled with zerovalent iron/activated carbon

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Abstract

In this study, an aerobic strain identified as Rhodococcus sp. was isolated from the sediment of a typical electronic waste disassemble site, Taizhou, China. This strain could use BDE-209 as the sole carbon and energy source and degrade 65.1 % of BDE-209 (initial concentration being 50 mg/L) within 144 h. To explore the BDE-209 degradation properties of this strain with the co-existed electronic donor, zerovalent iron/activated carbon (ZVI/AC) was introduced to build a microbial-chemical coupling system, which was found to promote the degradation of BDE-209 slightly (74.7 % in 144 h). Moreover, the debromination products in both of the batch experiments were determined with GC/MS, which showed that lower brominated PBDE congeners were produced almost in order of the number of bromine ions, ranged from nona- to di-BDEs. In addition, the possible debromination pathways of BDE-209 for each system were proposed respectively, which confirmed the microbial activity of BDE-209 debromination. Since some of the lower-brominated BDE congeners are much toxic than BDE-209, these microbial activities might bring potential hazards to the environment with BDE-209 contamination. It is the first time to investigate the transformation of BDE-209 with microbial-chemical coupling system, which is universal in the nature, thus suggesting that the ecological safety of environment exposed to PBDEs should be focused in the future.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41001316, 51108262), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WB1214059), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014 M551415).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Environmental Risk Assessment and Control on Chemical Process, School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Lili Liu, Yacong Zhang, Ruihong Liu, Feng Xu, Yilun Chen & Kuangfei Lin

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Zhiping Wang

Authors
  1. Lili Liu
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  2. Yacong Zhang
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  3. Ruihong Liu
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  7. Kuangfei Lin
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Correspondence to Lili Liu.

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Responsible editor: Ester Heath

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Liu, L., Zhang, Y., Liu, R. et al. Aerobic debromination of BDE-209 by Rhodococcus sp. coupled with zerovalent iron/activated carbon. Environ Sci Pollut Res 23, 3925–3933 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-5663-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-5663-4

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